In Ensign-1 you play the role of a space fighter pilot returning from a deep space colonization mission. On arrival back to our own solar system, you find Earth has been colonized by a hostile alien force. It's now up to you, with the help of your mothership, the Ensign-1, to take it back.

Ensign-1 allows allows for complete freedom in approaching objectives. You can fight from the safety of your spacecraft, or land and exit to explore space stations and carriers on foot. You can commandeer any spacecraft in the game, no matter how big or how small. Defend an asteroid base, or take the fight to the enemy with a huge mothership, friends manning turrets, it's your choice.

The game also features a multiplayer mode where players can explore a randomly generated galaxy, either fighting co-operatively to clean out enemy fighters, or battling each other for supremacy.

Ensign-1 has had a few updates lately: a few sound engine and cosmetic upgrades, and a few minor gameplay changes.

New HUD

On the cosmetic side, the HUD has been improved to provide players with information on their speed, pitch and heading. It's made of of scroll wheels that adjust in real time. In the future, I might add information on markers to nearby friendly and enemy capital ships.

New Sounds

Let me know what you guys think of this one. I've changed the sounds used for homing lock on slightly. Let me know if you prefer the change or would like it to be reverted. Here, give this a listen and be the judge...

I've also added a drone sound as ships are nearby, and you may also hear the occasional laser whiz by as well.

Gameplay Changes

Now to the good stuff. You'll now have a limited afterburner, or turbo, that you can use in game. This will give you a temporary speed advantage over your enemies making it much easier to catch them and shoot them down with your lasers. It also helps greatly when dodging missiles, which brings me to my next point....

If you sit around too long, you may find yourself the target of enemy missiles. That's right! It's not just you that are the predator now. Both allied wingmen and enemies alike have added homing missiles to their repertoire. Enjoy!

New Mission

There's also a new mission in the game involving the player stealing an alien ship to acquire some intel.

I thought about doing that, but I really don't want to have deal with flame wars and inappropriate comments. I'll have to see if there is a way to moderate comments before they post, I'm relatively new to YouTube in terms of uploading videos.

I believe I figured it out...enabling comments with the ability to moderate them, that is. It's probably my parental OCD talking, I just wanted to make sure I was maintaining a clean environment that everyone could enjoy. I apologize for the inconvenience.

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Most indie games focus on simple concepts that can be fully exploited with a small budget. This has led to some great classics, but I feel the possiblity of truly grand-scale indies has been left untapped. Ensign 1 is the sort of game that I wish had 10 million dollars behind it. I knew from the summary that the game allows an FPS portion when your ship is docked, but I didn't realize that you can actually move around your own ship while it is traversing through space. This feature is already implemented…